Have you looked at Hogsoft's Crosstalker? It's free at his website www.hogsoft.com. I think it does all that you want - select which figures' FBM/JCP controls/doesn't control other figures. No editing, no scripts to run directly. And if it doesn't met your needs I suspect that Howard will listen to contructive ideas - several have alreay been incorporated. And like all recent Hogsoft utilities the UI is super clean and straightforward, and works with PPP & P5 via Python, and P4 via P4PyE. Windows-only though.

Put parameter dial panel back into main Poser task a la P4/PPP so Windows' overhead doesn't need to get involved in basic (and time critical) intra-task communication. Remove CP for same reason. Update the Mac-to-Windows porting library to use current Windows APIs (that Win95 one MetaCreations and CL have used forever must be fully depreciated by now). Fix the various file handling bugs that screw up Windows - eg. closing folders opened to search for missing textures (the infamous "Folder Lock" problem). Keep track of virtual memory, and stop requesting it when you go beyond addressable space (2GB). IOH just make it a "well-behaved" Windows application. Sure I'd go for application speed up, new features (maybe), and a real UI, but all are quite pointless when the app is basically at war with the underlying OS! :-O

ynsean, "Peng, ya might just be surprised..." - are you referring to Peng's first sentence? Or his 2nd one? ;-) [SCNR]

There are various views on this, but I keep my VM at 960MB - for Windows 2K. Rationale is that no Windows (32bit) application can access more than 2GB - it's a Windows restriction. But Poser 5 seems to try to go beyond that 2GB limit at times resulting in instability (understatement ;-). So 1GB + 960MB keeps it "honest". (Why 960MB not 1GB? That happened to be the advised limit for another application on my system, so I stuck with it.)

Copy (Ctrl-c) will copy the dial settings - to the Clipboard on Windows. You can then paste (Ctrl-v) into any application which will handle tabbed delimited data - a spreadsheet such as Excel being the primary example, although many word processor applications or editors will accept this format and handle it correctly.

You could then edit to reverse the sign, process the morph dial name, etc., then reverse the copy/paste process to apply the other side?

Copy (Ctrl-c) will copy the dial settings - to the Clipboard on Windows. You can then paste (Ctrl-v) into any application which will handle tabbed delimited data - a spreadsheet such as Excel being the primary example, although many word processor applications or editors will accept this format and handle it correctly. You could then edit to reverse the sign, process the morph dial name, etc., then reverse the copy/paste process to apply the other side?

I think they are quite different in scope and purpose. I don't know Poser File Organizer, but know PBooost inside out.

From the marketplace info, PFO seems much closer to CorrectReference/CorrectReferencePro also from Hogsoft by Hogwarden. (The former is free, the latter much more powerful than CRFree - or PFO by the looks of it.)

PBooost is focused on switching "banks" of Poser Libraries in and out of Poser's runtime while Poser is running to effectively get around Poser's 255 folders per library limit. This allows for much more organized Poser libraries (even on P4/PPP which do not have sub-folder support). As such it is the program for doing this. PBooost is compatible with Poser 4/PP/5. If you are using it with Windows NT/XP you will need to correct any bad texture references (due to a bug in Poser, not PBooost), which you can do with CRFree or more easily with CRPRo; or perhaps PFO (if it's able to detect every error). For more info on Hogwarden's products check out Hogsoft's website hogsoft.com. PBooost is currently under further development, but existing and new purchasers can buy in confidence as Hogwarden has indicated that updates will free.

What sometimes works is to use P3DO to convert the .pngs to .rsrs which Poser can almost always read, then delete/rename the .pngs and let P5/PPP create new ones. P3DO manages to read some .pngs that are beyond Poser's ability. But there are some which defeat P3DO too. Then its a case of open and re-save in Photoshop (or the like), and repeat as above. BTW, I've noticed a recent increase in the number of really badly malformed .pngs, so perhaps some new buggy utility tool is out there? For vendors and others Quick MAT is the new easy way to create .pngs on-the-fly with it's incorporated Thumb-O-matic - and it creates .rsrs at the same time too.

Easiest source to find is in PoserPros under Poser 5 Tips & Tricks, as Jaager keeps it in the "Stickies" near the top. Reason removing CP works is that it uses IE, (Internet Explorer), so removing it removes links to an external routine(s) saving critical intertask performance hits (a problem since CL chose to make Parameter Dials a separate window in P5 - an OK thing to do on Mac, problematic on Windows). Removing calls to Face Room, Cloth, Hair, etc., are more complex because they are within the task, and less likely to save you much, 'cos the code is still going to be loaded into memory, and if you don't use it anyway, what is there to gain? And lots of risk of destabilizing the app. (Note your savings in removing CP can vary: early versions of P5 appear to have slightly different XML - which is not addressed by applying SRs. Also how you have your Internet connection set up, software firewall usage, etc., all give slightly different results. An early P5 updated with SRs - vs re-installed - with broadband connection and a software firewall such as ZoneAlarm set to prohibit Poser from accessing the 'Net, seems to give the biggest benefit from excluding CP.) If you are interested in Poser 5's "UI designers" work, take a look inside those .psd files! They not only used Adobe file formats directly(!), they didn't even clean the number of files, many duplicates exist(!), nor did they clean even the ones they actually used, you'll find all sorts of layers hidden with earlier/different versions of the UI, some with strange names(!). In fact it looks as if they took all the files off of the UI Designer's Mac one day mid-project without him/her knowing and shipped it before (s)he was finished. Oh wait - that is what they did ;-) For some of what you can do with these .psd files see my tweaks under the same PoserPros Poser 5 Tips & Tricks stickies.

;-)

Yes Penqui, it's an inherent restriction in the readscript() command. I suspect the command is so old that it doesn't handle the multi-figure figure numbers at all. Sorry Bobby, FII is the best way of handling it ;-) Then you can inject any character in the scene - not just the first one, just make sure that you click on the correct one before you apply the injection pose file. Trouble is there is some serious amount of editing to set it - a simple edit nut has to be done to every head & body injection morph file! It's a bit of a pain to edit multiple files in Windows, but easy on the Mac and trivial on nx. Plus once done it's some amount of work to revert to the original non-FII version should you want to. Also clothing doesn't conform without some edits too. Soon however a well-known Poser utility vendor should have an answer to all these issues...

The other workaround of course is to load your V3/M3/etc. inject, then save out temporarily, and when each character is ready start the final scene importing your already-injected figures. Way to premeditated for me ;-) Which is why I've been working to develop the FII concept originally discovered by Maveris.

Lulu, An injected character MUST be the very first figure loaded in a new scene. Even a default start figure that you delete before you load V3/M3/etc will prevent the readscript command used for the injection process to work properly. The head morphs work because they do not use ERC, but the body morphs do, so all the controls are assigned to the first figure to master, which is not what you want. Only workaround to always loading V3/M3/etc first is Figure Independent Injection or FII, search the Poser Tech forum for my post on how to implement. A little work to set up initially, but a utility to help bring FII to everyone is currently in developemnt.

duanemoody: "Add to this the fact that when pressed for details, CL grudgingly admits a large portion of Poser 5's code hasn't been ported from Carbon to Mach yet; for the rest of you out there this means it's still essentially running as OS 9 code, through a compatibility layer instead of written for the native OS. An app written for Win98 running in XP doesn't have this kind of hurdle to go through. Every other app I run on the Mac that's written for OS X from the ground up is blazingly fast, 3D apps included. Presumably Poser 6 will be truly OS X native code and this test will be more relevant between platforms." He, He! EXACTLY the same thing could be said for Poser (4 & 5) on Windows. Much of the code is still "running as OS 9 code, through a compatibility interface instead of native Windows OS. An app written for current Windows OS's running in XP doesn't have this kind of hurdle to go through. Every other app I run on Windows that's written for current Windows from the ground up is blazingly fast, 3D apps included.". Look at the file dialogs for a clear example of the hamstringing occuring. Or try an HT CPU. Your last sentence similarly substituted would read: "Presumably Poser 6 will be truly current Windows native code." I wish, but doubt there's much chance. History indicates it'll still be Windows calls done by a very old (Win 3.1?) (largely-) Widnows compatible interface library. So don't feel too hard done by. It's not a MacOS vs OSX per se, it's just that CL doesn't do rewrites of their code if they can possibly avoid it. ;-)

BB, Possibly. It's not listed on their website. CL had promised repeatedly to provide some reward for those who were trapped in the early P5 no-refund pre-release purchase. I wonder if this is it? If so it's not much of a sweetner: to those we have burnt so bad, we'll offer you a $50 discount, but only if you buy from us again! After all we paid $75 more than those who purchased post release. Reason for my first post, is that I could see that this could sorta make sense to CL, offer a $50 discount off of P6 to these early customers. But that would only be true if P6 is out in time (end June, '05). But as you say, if P6 is primarily a working P5 it should be free to at least the early purchasers (say pre SR2.1) - if not everybody. If it's a >$100 update, then well, I think I'll pass - sight unseen.